September 20, 2011

It used to irritate her. He would leave the chairs pushed too far back in, making the whole dining table symmetry skewed. He would leave the patio chairs pulled too far out. He would leave wet towels on wooden chairs.

And he would also close taps too tightly.

Often she would correct these things quietly. Sometimes she would remind him to keep things where they belonged. And there were those days when she would be too exhausted to explain and just leave things messy, the way he left them.

And then she would also lose her calm and yell.

None of this fixed what he used to do. Leaving things lived in, behind him. He just forgot, it was as simple as that.

And then one day, when she was impatiently explaining to him why the curtains needed to pulled back evenly on both windows, she stopped. And caught herself.

Everything froze around her and she saw an alternative reality dawning at the window. The window where the curtain was pulled too far back. A day when she was alone in this house they had built. A time when she could no longer see him in the same house. She called his name but there was no answer. He was not there anymore.

She didn't know where he was. Had he left her? Had he left the house? Had he left everything? It did not matter. The truth was, he wasn't there anymore. And she wanted to die where she was standing. She wanted to leave the chairs pushed too far back in, like he used to leave them. She would not allow that to be fixed. The curtains had to remain the way he left them, the patio chairs asymmetrically arranged, the towel dangling from the antique chair. Everything had to freeze.

None of her symmetries mattered without his presence. She had to know that everything had been lived in. By him, the way he always did it.

When she snapped back, he was fixing the curtain. A tear fell on the rug she was standing on then.

September 10, 2011

I was packing a lunch box. A day back. And the vegetable that I had cooked and was stuffing into the air-tight tiffin box was spinach.

Now we all know how volatile the nutrients in a leafy vegetable are. So I felt a bit off about cooking it and then packing it. It would travel across the city and go to an air-conditioned office where it would be opened 5-6 hours later and consumed.

Wouldn't all the nutrients evaporate by then? Get rendered useless?

But then, the box is air tight! Where would the nutrients go? Where could they possibly go from a space where escape of any kind was not possible?

I thought about that for a while.

And perhaps what I thought next is not an exact or perfect analogy, maybe it is not scientific and verifiable but well, when did I ever say this blog was about logic and set formulae?

If the soul of a man can escape from the body and this life despite your keeping him locked up in a vacuum from where no escape is possible...why can the soul of my spinach veggie not escape from the air-tight container too?